The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam Mendelsohn (review)

In The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed their Way to Success in America and the British Empire, historian Adam Mendelsohn begins with a question that has puzzled historians of American immigration and ethnicity for decades: What accounted for the particularly rapid upward mobility of American Jews? Previous scholars hypothesized that elements of the culture that Jewish immigrants brought with them to the United States from Europe—such as previous exposure to public education or high levels of literacy—must have aided their transition to the American economy. Mendelsohn, however, explores the possibility that Jewish upward mobility had less to do with preimmigration influences and more to do with their overwhelming participation in the American clothing industry. As this economic niche grew and transformed over the nineteenth century, Mendelsohn argues that it provided a particularly effective springboard for Jewish immigrants struggling to gain a secure foothold on American shores.

Rag Race compares the rapid upward mobility of American Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century with the slower, more limited trajectory of the Jews who settled in England. This comparison between two groups of Jewish migrants with identical backgrounds but different destinations provides an elegant framework for his argument, challenging those who would ascribe Jewish financial success to their cultural baggage. Mendelssohn compellingly shows, time and again, how the contingencies of the clothing industry in the United States provided opportunities especially suited to immigrant entrepreneurs operating from the fringes of the economy. Before the Civil War, to give just one example, non-Jews owned the established factories in the northeastern United States that sold ready-made menswear to the South, while Jewish newcomers to the trade took their chances with the more volatile and less lucrative California market. When the Civil War decimated the clothing factories serving the South, the Jewish-owned factories that were not exposed to Southern markets continued to thrive. Eventually, these factories dominated the market. In England, where no war upended the industry, Jewish factory owners did not move out of the margins.

A great pleasure of this volume is how it carefully details both the development of an industry and the impact that this industry had on individuals and communities. Readers discover how the influx of poor migrants fueled the market for cheap second-hand garments in the first half of the nineteenth century, and how hungry entrepreneurs tried to better meet their needs by establishing the production of new and affordable ready-made clothing. Of course, the availability of impoverished workers also helped facilitate the shift from second-hand to ready-made items, since their ill-paid piecework helped keep retail prices low. In both England and the United States, Jewish immigrants were deeply invested in every facet of this rapidly shifting industry: as consumers, workers, small- and large-scale manufacturers, and small- and large-scale retailers. In the case of American Jews, this communal immersion in a dynamic industry paved the way toward economic mobility.

It is unsurprising that a volume so ambitious and thought-provoking would spark questions that deserve further study. To give but one such example, Rag Race details the involvement of Jews in the production of menswear over the course of the nineteenth century, as the manufacture of men's clothing shifted from bespoke to ready-made items. The market for ready-made women's garments, Mendelsohn points out, did not develop until the turn of the twentieth century, at which point the clothing industry was already well-established as a heavily Jewish economic niche that provided opportunities for the more than two million additional immigrants who flocked to the United States between 1870 and 1924. I am curious as to why a market for ready-made women's clothing was so much slower to develop, since poor and immigrant working women had the same need for...